Writing in general and the short story in particular: An by L. Rust Hills

By L. Rust Hills

The vintage guide of brief tale writing, now revised and up to date.

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What it all derives from, of course, is the author's daydream: lonely and outcast, he dreams of "showing them" and proving the worth of his work. But what it all ends in, in the short story, is a character shift. Similar character shifts are involved in many of the stories that have solutions that depend on someone having been in disguise: the poor girl is really an heiress; the personable crook is really an undercover agent. The throwing on or off of the Slick Fiction, as against Quality Fiction / 53 disguise functions in the story the same way as a character shift functions — that is, it's an easy device for confusing things at the beginning, for working surprises in the middle, and for wrapping things up neatly at the end.

The categories never seemed to have much connection with plot; if they had any relevance at all, surely it was to theme. At any rate, the idea was that you'd take the basic formulas, provide some characters of your own, add some special background materials from your own experience or from research, mix well, and concoct thereby stories you could regularly sell to the slicks, making "up to" four hundred dollars a month "or more" in your spare time at home, send now. In truth, slick fiction seems to have been easy only for those who could do it.

And "anticipation" suggests children looking forward to Christmas presents. It's a tough, commercial, TV world we live in: a hard day and age for words. " It is perhaps very close to the "prepared awaiting" that we speak of as being what suspense itself is. We all sometimes experience anticipation when reading a novel or a story, or at least remember having experienced it when reading as a child. As an emotion, it doesn't seem much finer than curiosity or uncertainty, or not on the face of it anyway.

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